Our Perspectives

Our perspectives in 2016

29 Dec 2016

International Day of the Girl Child showed us how young women and girls are fighting inequality all over the world. Pictured here are young female computer coders in Kosovo. UNDP photo

This year UNDP celebrated its 50th anniversary and began the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It was a momentous year. And helping to narrate it all was our huge network of experts and development practitioners around the world.

At UNDP, one of our greatest strengths is our global reach; we’re on the ground in some 170 countries working with governments and citizens from all walks of life. Our blog is where UNDP officials and staff come to share their experience with you and offer their personal take on UNDP’s work.

The blog is a space for UNDP colleagues to discuss their work and exchange ideas and opinions. But this year we also opened up our platform to outside voices through a guest blog exchange series with OECD Development Matters that focused on the SDGs.

In case you missed it, here are some highlights from the many blog posts we published this year.

The X-reasons, things to know, etc….is always a successful format, and this one about the World Humanitarian Summit was particularly engaging because of its positive outlook on a difficult topic (Reason 2: It's fixable) and because it brought a huge global challenge down to a personal level (Reason 4: It's your money that's being spent).

Sub-Saharan Africa needs next-generation weather and climate services taught me something about the economics of weather forecasting. Since ‘every dollar spent produces a five-fold return’, it is a smart investment for developing countries. A reality-check for those of us who, like me, only look at the weather forecast when picking out our clothes for the day.

Defending the planet starts on your plate is a nice daily-life piece from one of our former interns on something that concerns each and every one of us, and the video that goes with it is an appealing ‘appeal’ from and to youth.

This blog for the Habitat III conference on urbanization was enlightening, because as suggested I did indeed picture Mongolia ‘as a country of nomadic horse riders herding livestock across the vast steppes’. I learned something and felt grateful for this snapshot from the other side of the world.

The post for International Day of the Girl Child did what the title said. It showed us how young women and girls are fighting inequality all over the world, from young female computer coders in Kosovo to school girls in Egypt taking on a touchy topic through song.

Anyone who’s ever taught children knows that you can learn as much from them as they from you. Based on a conversation with 20 kindergarten students, this post shows how the multiple dimensions of poverty are pretty simple to grasp.

Similarly, Development in 2 minutes answers some questions we hear quite a lot. What is development? And what does UNDP do? Though the context is Afghanistan, the answer is applicable everywhere. Development is about expanding choices.